Most nights find Wright, an associate clinical professor at UW Law School, working on his second thriller, a follow-up to his smash debut, The Coyotes of Carthage, a screwball dive into the bleak world of dark-money politics. No less an authority than bestselling legal-thriller writer John Grisham calls Wright “a major new voice.”

Down in his basement, sitting at a wood desk strewn with papers and empty bottles of unsweetened tea, Wright faces the wall with two screens in front of him (one for research, one for writing). Music pounds. Sam Cooke, Aretha, Master KG, Outkast, the Chicks. More often than not, the same song roars over and over and over and over again.

“For me, writing is a loud experience,” says Wright, who also lectures in the UW Program in Creative Writing, where he earned his MFA. “Part of the way I know I’m doing okay is that you sort of zoom out on the music. You’re not really listening to the lyrics. You lose track of time. You’re mesmerized with whatever’s on the screen.”

Author Lorrie Moore, Wright’s former UW writing instructor, is a bit in awe of him. “He works hard and stays up late,” she says. “He laughs and makes you laugh. He is blessed/cursed with a quick, high-energy brain.”

Wright is a towering presence, both intellectually and physically, thanks to his six-foot-two height. Besides his UW degree, he has a bachelor’s in economics and history and a master’s in environmental economics from Duke as well as a law degree from Washington University. He even found time to get a master’s from Johns Hopkins’s writing program while doing a five-year stint as a trial attorney in the civil rights division of the Department of Justice. When Wright applied to the UW’s program, he wrote, “I have the perfect job. For someone, but not me.”

His sly wit snakes through every page of The Coyotes of Carthage. When asked to describe himself, he conjures up a cinematic vision, pointing out his freckles, hair that’s a little wild, and his “exceptionally big head,” which requires him to wear “special big-headed glasses.”

Besides teaching in two programs, Wright is the former codirector of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, which seeks to exonerate wrongly convicted people. Thanks in part to his efforts, four men were freed.

Wright continues to meet clients in Wisconsin’s maximum-security prisons with law students in his clinic. “I sometimes describe it as being like Scooby-Doo,” he says. “A bunch of students and I get in a van, and we go and try to solve murders around the state.”

Experiences like these inform Wright’s fiction. His Department of Justice work, for example, had him trekking to rural areas to try voting rights cases. While passing time in places like Bolivar County, Mississippi, he befriended local politicians — “masters of their communities,” as he calls them. And the down-and-dirty secrets he learned about small-town elections reveal themselves throughout The Coyotes of Carthage.

Swamp Creature

The novel tells the tale of Dre Ross, a sleazy, 30-something, African American political consultant in Washington, DC. A former small-time drug dealer raised by a bipolar schizophrenic mother, he slept in alleys and did hard time in juvenile prison for a savage assault he didn’t commit.

This down-and-out swamp creature has been given his last chance: Go to backwater Carthage, South Carolina. Dupe its flag-waving voters into approving a ballot initiative that will sell public land to a mining company. Never mind that its toxic runoff will kill tourism, poison the water supply, and basically destroy the place. The dirty trickster whips up websites for phony front groups such as the Council of Christian Commerce and the Society for American Freedom. He runs dishonest ads and polls. He launches nasty online attacks.

Dre, writes Wright, “wonders at what point he lost control.” Whether he means of the campaign, his sanity, his decency, or all three goes unsaid. Lest a reader think Dre only has it in for white people, he is an equal-opportunity abuser who “admits that for his people he might have done more harm than good.”

Sour wisdom from the dark-money world — and Wright’s rural journeys — peppers Dre’s thoughts. “Elections are about getting voters to hate others.” “God bless social media. Good for pictures; terrible for truth.”

“Steve has a real heart to his work,” says novelist Judith Claire Mitchell, who formerly taught in the UW creative writing program. “There’s an emotional openness that balances the cynicism. His main character in Coyotes is very openly wounded. His heart is broken, and that’s not hidden.”

Critics loved the book for the way it combines the alienation of Catch-22’s Joseph Heller with Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo ethos and the wacky imagery of a Coen brothers movie. “Riveting,” with a “tick-tock pace and knockout prose,” cheered the Washington Post. “Darkly funny and bleakly honest,” gushed Salon. “Crackerjack debut,” raved USA Today, which put Wright on its list of “100 Black Novelists You Should Read.”

“Writing,” says Wright, “is the art of keeping people paying attention.”

Like most first-time novelists, he took a long time to finish The Coyotes of Carthage — four and a half years. He came home from work and would “eat something, walk the dogs, and write — and that was my life.” When he gave the supposedly final manuscript to friends to read, they hated it. Too intellectual, too grim, they said.

During those years Wright had started visiting prisons. “The darkness of that world — the horrific crimes, the awfulness of the wrong person going to jail, and the possibility that the real person who did it was out there and causing more harm — entered the novel, and it became very different from what I wanted it to be,” he says. “I don’t know if I was using it as therapy.”

When told he should cut it from 140,000 to 70,000 words, Wright says, “I was pretty sad, but you stand up. You brush yourself off, and then you go at it, and in the end, I’m still quite proud of it. But it’s obviously a very different book than I thought I had finished four years ago.”

First novels are notoriously autobiographical, but Wright’s upbringing bears no resemblance to Dre’s. When asked what traits he has in common with his ruthless, haunted antihero, Wright jokes, “I think in the book I describe him as exceptionally good-looking.” He quickly confesses that he shares Dre’s “cynicism and acerbic responses. I can be a bit of a smart aleck.”

A Family of Eccentrics

The son of a computer scientist mother and a father who was an army doctor, Wright grew up obsessed with storytelling. He loved the Choose Your Own Adventure book series, which allowed preteen readers to control plots by deciding which way stories would turn.

He wrote his own Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and fan fiction and remains an avid devotee of Star Trek and Star Wars. His dog, Ahsoka, a black Lab/Great Pyrenees mix, is named after a Star Wars character mentored by the virtuous young Anakin Skywalker (before he became Darth Vader).

“He tries to show her all the ways in the world to be good, with the irony being he ends up the worst person in the world,” Wright says, adding, “Now that’s not at all my relationship with my dog.”

His two sisters and parents were also Trekkies. “I’ll be honest,” he says, “I come from a family of eccentrics.”

He had a globetrotting childhood, growing up in Nashville, Spokane, Oakland, and on military bases in West Germany and Alaska. “There’s nothing like being an American overseas, especially during the Cold War, to make you love and admire your country.”

Having been in spit-polish schools on military bases, Wright got the shock of his young life in Augusta, Georgia, where he endured his junior and senior high school years. With uncharacteristic understatement, he says, “That experience was formative.” Westside High School introduced him to a community where education was inseparable from race, Christianity, and traditional notions of patriotism.

Once, when he stayed silent for a football game prayer and merely bowed his head, teammates razzed him. A teacher yelled at a student for failing to show respect for the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance. Students isolated themselves by race at lunch, and admission to Advanced Placement classes seemed to Wright to have a cap on Black students.

“Race is one of those things we continue to try to figure out,” he says. “Obviously, over the arc of our country, we’ve made tremendous progress, but especially as a Black civil rights lawyer who represents Black men in the criminal justice system, [I see] we clearly have a long way to go.

“A lot of the conversations we have about even discussing race in our schools deal with people’s discomfort with having conversations about our past and how that implicates our present. My hope is that we can get better at having those conversations. Hopefully, that will lead to better policy in health care, criminal justice, poverty — things I’ve dedicated my life to dealing with.”

Part of the key to Wright’s success is his easygoing nature, which allows him to feel at home in varied settings.

“He has no problem being plunked down in a room with conservatives or liberals, or with people who aren’t interested in politics or who are very interested in politics,” says his former Department of Justice colleague Robert Popper, who is now senior counsel at the right-leaning group Judicial Watch. “He likes to laugh with and, frankly, at them all.”

Back in his days as a rural trial lawyer, Wright became friends with a lot of politicians he would not necessarily vote for. “But I thought they were very good people, and it wasn’t the end of the world,” he says.

This ability to see all sides of people and situations clearly has benefits for Wright’s work as both a novelist and a law school professor.

No Easy Answers

Wright takes his law students behind bars in the Wisconsin towns of Waupun, Stanley, and Green Bay.

He struggles to describe the smell of a maximum-security prison. A “giant antiseptic bleach” scent provides the top note. Underneath lurk odors of men who haven’t showered because of guard shortages. “I think it’s the smell of misery,” Wright says.

Before the students go in, he gives them a talking to.

“This is something you’re going to remember the rest of your life,” he tells them, keeping tabs on their moods. “I’m always mindful of their energy and the tone, because there’s just objectively sadness in a prison, and for some students, it’s scary.

“Prisons are by design intimidating. You walk through one hall. A door closes behind you, the barred door opens in front of you, and you walk down another hall. Just the sound of it. The clicking of bars behind you and the clicking of doors ahead of you. The whole aesthetic. You’re occasionally given a tour, and we’ve been to solitary wings. There are guys in there just screaming for their lives.”

Nevertheless, Wright encourages his students to retain a sense of humor.

“You can still have moments of levity and moments of laughter,” he says. “I want them to learn, but I want them to have fun. I don’t see how you can have fun without laughing every once in a while.”

Most of his students have very strong feelings about the criminal justice system. Some hate police and believe no one should go to jail. Some think police can do no wrong, and there are no innocent people in jail. “They tend to be a little simplistic at both extremes,” says Wright.

“Part of what I hope to do is to create some complexity, to explain to students that oftentimes there aren’t a lot of easy answers, that there are different stakeholders, and that all people — including the police, suspects, and victims — are not all just one thing.”

Spoken like a true novelist. •

Kiana Beaudin trained as a physician assistant but became the executive director of health for the Ho-Chunk Nation. Andy Manis

Kiana Beaudin ’10, MPAS’15 got into the field of health care because of her father.

“My dad got cancer,” she says. “And I was Daddy’s girl.”

Beaudin grew up in Madison, where her mother was a librarian in the UW’s College Library and her father was on the faculty at UW Law School. He succumbed to cancer when she was just 13, and while he was ill, she accompanied him to appointments, amazed at the technology but more impressed with the professionals who worked so hard to heal him. She considered medical school but decided to focus on becoming a physician assistant rather than an MD. “That was a better fit for me,” she says. “It appealed to me because I would be able to spend more time with my patients than a typical MD would.”

After graduation, she spent a decade in practice before she received a higher calling. In the summer of 2019, Marlon WhiteEagle, the president of the Ho-Chunk Nation, asked Beaudin to take on the role of executive director of health in his administration. She accepted, not out of ambition but obligation.

“It was the way in which he asked me,” she says. “He didn’t say, ‘Oh, hey, do you want to take this position?’ If he had, I’d have said no, I don’t want to do that, because patient care is my passion. I never thought about leadership and policy. But he said, ‘I need you to help. I’m asking you to help our people.’ When he framed it that way, I felt I couldn’t refuse.”

Less than a year after she accepted the role of executive director, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, upending public health efforts around the world. Beaudin had begun her job with straightforward goals: to cut red tape and encourage more preventive health care. Once COVID arrived, she found herself dealing with the pandemic in many ways. COVID restrictions shut down casinos — a major employer — which led to layoffs and a broader range of health issues. But though her work is vital, she intends to step down in July 2023. She misses the personal contact.

Being in a clinic, she says, “felt carefree. I’m looking forward to going back.”

It’s a nice night, about 37 degrees and clear — a stark contrast to the six-inch blustery blizzard blanketing Madison. Lindsay arrives, and Linda hops into the car. The Zoom call that Linda’s taking on her iPhone automatically connects to the car’s Bluetooth, and it takes a bit of fumbling to get it back to the phone’s speaker. It’s rush hour — 5:05 p.m. eastern time — but traffic is pretty light. The two are going to have dinner with the other members of their “bubble”: Linda’s son, Lafayette, and his family. By all accounts, it’s a perfectly average family on a perfectly average night.

Only this family is far from average, especially its matriarch. For she’s Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield, and in two months, she will be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve in President Biden’s cabinet as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. One of the first cabinet picks announced on November 24, 2020, her nomination was met with resounding applause from diplomats and leaders across the globe.

This is not Thomas-Greenfield’s first time in a presidential administration. Under George W. Bush, she held the post of U.S. ambassador to Liberia. Beginning in 2013, she served the Obama administration as the assistant secretary for the Bureau of African Affairs. She held that position through 2017, when it was eliminated by the Trump administration in a downsizing effort. Thomas-Greenfield is a proud career diplomat, but it’s certainly not the direction she had anticipated her life would take. Her dream was to be a lawyer; it’s the first thing she remembers wanting to be when she grew up. While that dream may have changed over time, UW–Madison recognized her excellence and service with an honorary doctor of laws in 2018.

Excellence and service run in the family: Thomas-Greenfield met her husband, Lafayette Greenfield, while they were both working in Liberia as foreign service officers for the U.S. Department of State. Lindsay followed in their footsteps and now works as a foreign service specialist stationed in La Paz, Bolivia. She’s home for the holidays, but heads back overseas tomorrow (thus Tuesday night’s family dinner). And son Lafayette II realized his mom’s childhood dream and earned his law degree from Howard University in 2013. He is now a partner at a DC firm.

Raising a family while in the foreign service wasn’t an easy feat, but Thomas-Greenfield excels at transitions. “Studies have shown that the most stressful time in a person’s life is when they’re moving from one place to another,” she says. “As foreign service diplomats, we have these stresses every two to three years.”

Perhaps her most challenging move, she recalls, was relocating to Pakistan from Kenya. “Me, too!” Lindsay chimes in from the driver’s seat. Mother and daughter share a quick aside, tallying up the places Lindsay has lived.

“Maybe seven?” Lindsay thinks. “No,” says Linda. “You lived in Nigeria, the Gambia, Kenya, Pakistan, and Switzerland with me.”

“And Lima!”

“Oh, she was in Lima, Peru!”

Linda transitions back to her Zoom call and, like a proud parent, adds, “And then she joined the foreign service and went to DRC Congo, and is now serving in La Paz.”

Amid all of these transitions, it was important to keep the family grounded. No matter where they were, every year the whole family would return to the U.S. and Thomas-Greenfield’s home state of Louisiana. There the children could connect with their family, grow up knowing their relatives, and develop a sense of rootedness.

Thomas-Greenfield was born in Baker, Louisiana, in 1952. The population at the time was shy of 5,000. As she described in a 2018 TEDx Talk, “We’re in the Deep South. I’m in a segregated town in which the KKK regularly would come on weekends and burn a cross in somebody’s yard.” Graduating from high school was bold for Thomas-Greenfield, and not just because she was bused every day past two all-white, better-funded high schools to get to her own.

Her mother had gone to school only through eighth grade. Her father left school in third grade so he could work. “He couldn’t read or write,” she said in the TEDx Talk, “but he was the smartest man I knew.”

After graduation in 1970, Thomas-Greenfield made another bold move by attending Louisiana State University (LSU). She was not wanted there: LSU “had to be forced” by court order to accept nonwhite students. “I was entering a hostile environment,” she said. Among the students on campus alongside her was David Duke, who became grand wizard of the KKK.

It was natural, Thomas-Greenfield says, to expect overt racism in the South. When she came to Madison for her graduate work, she assumed that racism wouldn’t be an issue.

“It was, for me, the first time I was in a community in which at least I believed that race was not a factor,” she reflects.

But she quickly learned that her assumptions were wrong. “There had been a football game, and you know how crazy State Street can be after a football game. I was walking out of the library and walked up to State Street. I was standing on the corner waiting to cross the street, and somebody passed by in a car, called me the N-word, and sprayed me with a water gun,” Thomas-Greenfield recalls.

In the car, her daughter is silent.

“That was the most devastating experience I’ve ever had. … I wouldn’t have been devastated if that had been in Louisiana, because you always expect it. In Wisconsin, I didn’t expect that. It really took my breath away to have that happen in Madison.”

Thomas-Greenfield cautions current UW students of color to be prepared: “Racism exists everywhere. They need to be prepared for it, but they should not let it stifle them. … My feeling about racism is it’s not my problem, as much as it is the problem of the person who is the racist. Don’t take their problem and make it into your problem.”

The transition from Louisiana to Madison was so stark, it reminds Thomas-Greenfield of the cultural shift she experienced moving from Kenya to Pakistan. “I had to adjust to being comfortable in a white world,” she says. “A friend of mine [from the UW] just sent a picture of us from Madison, and it was just me as the only Black person. Every other person was white. My friends were like, ‘Where are the Black people in that picture, Linda?’ And I’m like, ‘You saw the Black people, it was me!’ ”

As Linda and Lindsay drive, the conversation shifts from the past to the future. For people across the world, 2020 was a year of massive transitions: working in offices to working remotely, in-person gatherings to virtual events, being employed to being jobless. And just three weeks after this car ride will come the monumental shift from a Trump administration to a Biden administration in the White House.

Where, exactly, will she start? “You start by engaging,” explains Thomas-Greenfield.

“Humbling yourself,” Lindsay adds, and Linda agrees.

“I think there will be a tremendous amount of humility that we have to bring to the table. It’s going to require a lot of effort.”

Effort and humility aren’t the only things Thomas-Greenfield will bring to the table; in fact, what she literally brings to tables across the world is what helped put her diplomacy on the map: gumbo.

Breaking bread is a diplomatic method that’s about as old as time. Whether it’s breaking bread or breaking crab legs, the method is simple, but effective. Step one: invite everyone over. Step two: share a meal — and realize you have more in common than not. Thomas-Greenfield adopted this method during her 35-year tenure in the foreign service, cooking her famous gumbo with leaders and diplomats across four continents.

“I called it gumbo diplomacy,” she said in her November nomination-acceptance speech. “Wherever I was posted around the world, I invited people of different backgrounds and beliefs to … make homemade gumbo. It was my way of breaking down barriers, connecting with people, and starting to see each other on a human level. That’s the charge in front of us today.” •

Hamilton Pier became the first woman in the country to be granted a judicial appointment. Courtesy of Fond Du Lac County Historical Society

Kate Hamilton Pier LLB1887 was a successful real estate saleswoman in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, when she decided to get a law degree. Her daughter, also named Kate, was headed for law school. Pier did not think her daughter should go to campus unaccompanied, so they both earned their law degrees in 1887.

Kate Hamilton Pier became the first woman in the United States to be granted a judicial appointment when she was named commissioner of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court in 1891. That same year, daughter Kate became the first woman to argue — and win — a case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Pier’s two younger daughters, Caroline and Harriet, soon followed her path to the UW Law School. In 1891, Caroline and Harriet were admitted to the bar, meaning that the mother and daughters made up four of the eight female lawyers in Wisconsin at the time.

The women then worked in the family law firm, practicing first in Fond du Lac and then, in 1888, in Milwaukee. The firm was instrumental in the passage of two Wisconsin laws, one enabling women to act as legal assignees, and another enabling female attorneys to be court commissioners.

Kate Hamilton Pier was also the first woman to cast a vote in Fond du Lac County, years before the suffrage act passed.

As part of the On Wisconsin women’s issue, see other UW alumnae you oughta know.

In a polarized world, UW–Madison fosters tough conversations.

On a warm autumn afternoon when I needed it badly, I got a shot of hope for the future of conversation. Pulling up a chair at the Memorial Union Terrace and eavesdropping there under the old oak trees, I heard brilliant debate by research scientists about the best way to get a stubborn gene to express. At another table, there was virtuosic smack talk accompanying a game of cribbage. These lovely (loud!) sounds are ear candy after the deafening silence of being among too many people staring at their phones. They confirmed for me that the great collegiate tradition of chewing the fat with friends lives on.

But I still worried about our collective capacity to have deep conversations about tough topics with people who aren’t already our friends or colleagues and who we suspect see the world from a different perspective. Research shows that, for the first time in more than two decades, members of both political parties have strongly unfavorable opinions of their opponents. And our society is highly subdivided in other ways, so that people often end up congregating almost exclusively — in real life and through online communities — with others who share the same racial, religious, and demographic profiles.

Luckily, though, many at UW–Madison are actively seeking, encouraging, and developing the ability to discuss difficult topics fruitfully. Students are seeking out opportunities to talk through some of the biggest matters on their minds, and they (like many faculty members) are eager to argue respectfully and learn more about what they don’t understand. And those of us eager to reclaim conversation — the face-to-face kind — as a means for sifting through the complexity of contemporary life and building bridges can learn a lot from listening to what people on campus are doing.

Fireside chats

Later last fall, I joined the student-run Afternoon Conversation Series, a regular all-comers-welcome meetup held beside the flickering hearth of the Prairie Fire coffee shop inside Union South. I found about a dozen undergrads and graduate students listening intently as the day’s invited guest, Sumudu Atapattu, director of the UW Law School’s Research Centers and a specialist in international environmental law, spoke in soft, serious tones about the impacts climate change is already having on daily life in places vulnerable to rising sea levels, including parts of Alaska.

Though the legal and human rights implications of climate change Atapattu detailed were sobering, the students present seemed undaunted, going on to pepper her with thoughtful questions about how they might help push for change. One young woman wondered if she could combine her interests in law, science, and economics in a career. Absolutely, Atapattu says. If we’re going to meet the challenges of climate change, “all of those disciplines need to learn how to communicate with each other.”

Last year the group also discussed the status of the young immigrants known as DREAMers and international women’s health. After the conversation, one of the group’s organizers told me that the aim of these intimate talks on serious topics is to give students a chance to interact with professors without “the usual intimidating student–teacher power dynamics.”

The art of argument

UW mathematics professor Jordan Ellenberg is a fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and professional-grade curator of talk — one of those classic social network figures who’s as comfortable discussing baseball and James Baldwin as he is breaking down the intricacies of multivariable equations. Over tea at a café near campus last spring, Ellenberg says that, for him, a key benefit of working at “this gigantic, multifarious institution” is having many opportunities to chat and mind-meld with researchers working in far-flung disciplines, who often shed surprising new light on his work, and he on theirs. But he also enjoys the “intellectual exfoliation” he receives as a result of speaking with other faculty members who aren’t afraid to challenge conventional wisdom and “push you to expand and enlarge” how you view an issue.

One such stimulating loofah figure Ellenberg always likes being “a little conversationally scraped by” is Harry Brighouse. The UW philosophy professor has argued on his popular blog and at various campus gatherings on teaching methodologies that the standard, top-down instructional model many American college classrooms follow does students a disservice. Research shows that college students (and adults generally) can pay attention to a single speaker for only about 20 minutes. So Brighouse makes a deliberate point of beginning classes with a short lecture, but then largely ceding the floor to his students.

To keep the conversation on track — or to redirect when one or more students begin to dominate a group discussion — Brighouse continues to dole out questions carefully. And he has his students — most of whom are accustomed to socializing mainly with their dorm and apartment mates — introduce themselves to each other over and over. It’s a strategy inspired by his own experience as an undergraduate at King’s College London, where he not only took all of his classes with the same group of people, but lived and ate meals with them, too, sparring over philosophy and history all the while.

And his chief aim, he explains, is to help students burn through shyness to become friends and strong intellectual debate partners for each other.

“Some of my students come to college reeeeally reluctant to argue. But even they will eventually say, ‘What are we going to argue about next?’ They’re really hungry for this,” Brighouse says.

Describe your path

In his cozy office decorated with vintage school maps and a stellar collection of LEGO Star Wars ships, Greg Downey, associate dean for the social sciences in the College of Letters & Science, keeps a small conference table. Students know they can sit down and discuss their aspirations and future plans, bouncing ideas around until they land on ones that feel, if not perfect, then good enough for now. And it’s here — as well as in the college’s popular Taking Initiative professional planning course, which Downey leads, and its new SuccessWorks career center — where Downey and his colleagues are invested in helping students get hands-on experience and find the right words to describe their evolving skills and interests to prospective employers.

Companies consistently report that they consider strong verbal and written communication skills essential for hiring, and there’s evidence from social psychology showing that creating an overarching narrative (aka storyline) for your life helps people gain healthy perspective and move ahead fruitfully. Downey has each of his students develop a “two-minute career story” and practice delivering it with classmates. Some struggle with the assignment. Maybe they’ve heard that speaking about your accomplishments amounts to bragging, or they’re still not entirely sure what they want to do with their lives, Downey explains. But once they hear other students sharing similar stories and realize that it’s okay to be still exploring options and just say this plainly, they usually get more comfortable.

But there are other reasons why he thinks it’s important for him, and faculty and staff at colleges everywhere, to be available to speak with students about whatever’s weighing on their minds. “UW students are accomplished and goal-oriented,” Downey says. “If you set them a task, they will work through it.” But he and other campus advisers have also realized — partly in light of the fact that the number of college students seeking treatment for anxiety and depression has shot up in recent years — “that we need to be continually active in encouraging our students to talk with us, and talk with each other,” he says.

Beyond managing coursework, many students today face “family pressures, peer pressures, [and] pressures from jobs. Technology pervades their lives, and while sometimes it helps them cope, sometimes it ratchets those pressures up.”

Group dynamics

More and more, students and faculty are seeking out and welcoming conversations where they can feel not only free, but encouraged to unfurl — working through difficult thoughts together with others in an unhurried way, saying things they’ve never said (or thought) before, opening up new doors of understanding to combat distrust.

Last fall, the UW released its Campus Climate Survey, which found that, while most students find the campus to be a safe, welcoming, and respectful place, students of color and from other historically disadvantaged groups consistently rated the climate less favorably overall than students from majority groups did. And since then, the work of various UW discussion programs created to foster greater equality, inclusion, and understanding across differences has taken on new urgency.

One such program, run by the UW School of Education’s Department of Counseling Psychology, is Diversity Dialogues. When it started almost 15 years ago, the big, burning divide that students wanted to discuss was the difference between students from the Midwest and the coasts. But now that issues of racial discrimination, gender nonconformity, and economic disparity have shot to the forefront of national news, students from different racial, ethnic, gender, and class backgrounds are eager to meet and talk about how these dimensions have shaped their experiences and perceptions.

UW professor of counseling psychology Steve Quintana, who directs Diversity Dialogues, says that one of its primary objectives is to help students recognize that all people (not just those who are obviously similar to them) are “living rich, interesting, and complex lives.” The theory behind deepening social understanding is that it makes it easier for people to understand and appreciate (if not always love) why others may act a certain way or hold a certain view.

To help students who typically have never met before they start talking, Quintana and other dialogue facilitators give participants different cues, such as asking them to describe pivotal childhood experiences or their own negative or positive experiences of diversity. A running rule is that no one can interrupt whoever is speaking for at least 90 seconds. Facilitators also work to sustain a respectful balance by reminding participants that every person’s perspective and personal experience are valid.

They also point out that mixed-company conversations on race, in particular, have a tendency to become “one-sided white confessionals,” wherein white students wax on describing their guilt over certain societal privileges they’ve enjoyed, at the expense (in terms of comfort) of black students in the group. But just naming the potential dynamic up front and noting that it can place additional burdens on black students is a surprisingly effective way of keeping it at bay, Quintana says.

After they’ve participated in the program, many students tell him that learning how to trade notes on class, race, sexuality, and other topics in a calm, non-adversarial setting (unlike so many of the combative finger-pointing sessions we see on TV today) made them feel more flexible and open — and eager to keep speaking with people who aren’t obviously like them. Getting new “windows into the depths of people’s experience is rewarding,” Quintana says. Once they’ve realized that everyone has an interesting story to tell, students often say they’re more likely to break the ice with strangers in everyday settings.

Comfortable with uncomfortable

UW professor Christy Clark-Pujara often spends the first few sessions of her classes on African American history and the history of slavery speaking with students about why it’s important for them to be able to discuss race together, even though it’s a subject many of them have been told to avoid. And she explains that “it’s okay to feel uncomfortable in this class, and even a good thing, because that’s where you learn and grow.” Clark-Pujara knows most of her students have so far been taught only the scantest rendition of black American history: “First there was slavery. That was bad, but some people were nice. Then there was Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement, and now everything’s fine.” But then she begins fleshing out that time line with stories that fly in the face of certain well-oiled myths, including the myth that slaves did little to resist their circumstances.

“When you look at the primary documents, the history of slavery becomes a history of great resistance — not only physical, but moral, emotional, and cultural resistance,” Clark-Pujara says. She also disproves the folkloric belief that Wisconsin was always free of slavery. French-Canadian trappers brought slaves with them when they settled here in the early 1700s. When Southerners — including Henry Dodge, two-time governor of the Territory of Wisconsin — arrived in the early 1800s to mine for lead in the southwestern part of what later became the state, they had slaves with them, too.

At some point during the semester, students of different races overflow with “indignation” over never having been given an inkling of this richer, more complicated history. Clark-Pujara is there for all of it, ready to help them talk through and process “the terribly uncomfortable” fact that the “economic ascent of the United States rests on the backs of enslaved black people.” Empathy is a major theme in the class, she adds.

As we neared the end of our own conversation, Clark-Pujara pulled out two thank-you notes she had just received from students who’d taken her Introduction to African American History course. Each described a different way in which the class and Clark-Pujara’s teaching had changed not only their minds but their lives. The notes were beautiful. And they reminded me why talk, at the UW and everywhere, is so vital to staying alive and engaged: our world is never going to be perfect, and individuals and systems will inevitably let us down. But we should by no means withdraw and give up.

By debating and grappling with new ideas together with others, in real time — riding tides of confrontation without getting too rattled, watching one another’s faces light up and fall and light up again — we get to take another look at what we think, and make it better.

But we can’t get there through silence.

Jeff Miller

A restraining order is often a first line of defense for domestic-violence victims seeking protection from an abusive partner. But the process for obtaining one under traumatic conditions can be overwhelming — especially for victims who can’t afford the costs of a lawyer.

The UW Law School (at right, above) has stepped in to address this gap in legal services, with plans to open the VOCA Restraining Order Clinic with federal funds secured by the state justice department from the 1984 Victims of Crime Act. The clinic partners with domestic-abuse agencies in the Madison area and southern Wisconsin that will refer women who need help.

Law students must make a semester-long commitment, during which they will complete two or three cases with supervision and mentoring from licensed attorneys. And the experience will broaden their understanding of the physical, psychological, and economic challenges victims face, says Marsha Mansfield ’77, JD’84, a family law clinical professor and the director of the school’s Economic Justice Institute.

That insight is a critical part of doing domestic-violence work. “Working with victims of sexual assault and domestic violence requires a deep empathy and understanding of trauma,” Mansfield says.

Bryce Richter

After 70 secretive years, a gargoyle has been reunited with its twin. One of the sandstone statues, which sat atop the old Law School, was thought to have been destroyed during the building’s 1963 demolition. But the children of Paul Been ’49 LLB’53 grew up hearing a different story. Been, along with a fellow law student, hauled it away in a wheelbarrow after a storm, according to the family. His children returned the statue in September.

Pat Richter

To some Badgers, Pat Richter is remembered as the star of one of the most exciting football games ever: the 1963 Rose Bowl, which the Badgers lost 42–37 after a furious fourth-quarter comeback fell short. To others, he’s known for transforming UW–Madison into a sports powerhouse. When he became athletics director in 1989, the program had a multimillion-dollar deficit. He led an effort to hire coaches and build facilities that made the Badgers a national force. Richter retired in 2004 but has kept an active eye on the UW.

Vince Lombardi was one of your coaches. What did you learn from him?

I played for Lombardi for just one year, in 1969 [with Washington], but he taught me what it means to be a professional. I had a job to do, and if I did my job — if everyone did their jobs — we would be a successful enterprise. Now, football is just a game, but that outlook carries over to other, more important things: businesses, police and fire departments. Don’t just think about yourself. Think professionally about how your job fits with other jobs, and the enterprise will succeed.

After you left football, you became an executive at Oscar Mayer, but then you returned to athletics at the UW. How did that experience shape you?

Well, Oscar Mayer, athletics — you’re dealing with hot dogs at either place, aren’t you?

But did it affect the way you worked at the UW?

One of the things I brought with me to the UW was the belief that motivation is key. What motivates a coach or anyone else to be successful? I looked for people who were motivated by more than just financial reasons, and not people who looked at the job as a stepping-stone. [Basketball coaches] Dick Bennett, Bo Ryan — they had strong personal connections to Wisconsin. I looked for people who wanted to bring respect and a tradition of success to the UW.

And you recruited in similar ways as vice president of personnel at Oscar Mayer?

I often recruited from the UW because it provides future leaders. I remember talking to somebody who actually was getting a PhD in music (piano). Yet they wanted to be a salesperson at Oscar Mayer. And because of the breadth of their education, it turned out that they were perfectly qualified to do that and be very successful.

In retirement, you’re still involved with the university. What causes do you support?

[My wife] Renee and I have been targeted in our support, but Alzheimer’s is one area. It’s taken on a bit more meaning because of what’s happening with football players. You know, Lou Holland [’65] was a friend of ours. He was a teammate, and [years later], we’d see him at games, but unfortunately, that’s when he started having problems with dementia, and you could see him beginning to slip, and it was very sad to see him. Week to week, almost, a couple weeks between games, you could see his deterioration. He was a great teammate and friend who accomplished great things.

What makes the UW so special to you?

I think there’s a certain cultural aura about the University of Wisconsin. Obviously, it’s a huge school, yet with the wide range of things that you can experience, from athletics to academics, social activities, the Union, Hoofers — it’s not like this anywhere in the world.

The Law School’s diplomas were much larger in 1876 than they have been in recent years. Compared to his “postcard”-sized diploma, Peter Christianson ’71, JD’77 says, they are “small billboards.” Mary Jo Koranda, Head of Circulation, UW Law Library

For years, the diploma for Clarion Youmans LLB1876, who graduated from the UW Law School just eight years after its founding, has hung discreetly on a wall tucked in the back of the Law Library.

“I hadn’t even realized (the diploma was there),” says Bonnie Shucha JD’14, the associate dean for library and information services and director of the Law Library. “I’ve been here for almost 20 years, and I had no idea. I have passed that diploma every day and … never took a close look at what that thing was.”

All of that changed when retired attorney Peter Christianson ’71, JD’77 retrieved another Law School diploma last summer that belonged to Youmans’s classmate, Henry Frawley LLB1876.

Christianson, a proud alumnus who is part of a five-generation Badger family, has collected UW memorabilia — such as Homecoming buttons and family diplomas — for years. Because he receives email alerts about UW–related news, he was notified that Frawley’s diploma would be auctioned off in South Dakota, where Frawley resided after graduating from the university.

From the start, Christianson wanted the Law School to have it back. “I thought it should come home,” he says, adding that if the diploma wasn’t returned now, it likely never would be.

But bringing Frawley’s diploma home proved to be no straight- forward task. Christianson, who signed up to participate in the auction by phone because it didn’t accept online bids, had been told that the diploma was expected to be auctioned off early. Nearly nine hours after it started, he received a call from the auctioneer: the diploma was up next. Until that point, he says, he thought he’d been forgotten.

Christianson placed the winning bid for the diploma, purchasing it for $500, and had it preserved and reframed before presenting it to the Law School at a faculty meeting.

Shucha, who has a background in history, was intrigued by Christianson’s presentation. She started looking into Frawley’s story when she found out that the school had a second diploma from the same year: Youmans’s. While researching the two graduates, she also discovered that they had been leaders in their communities: Youmans worked as a county judge, state senator, and farmer in Wisconsin; and Frawley was a lawyer and rancher in South Dakota.

Now, just in time for the school’s 150-year anniversary, plans are under way to display the two diplomas together.

“That was really good timing, to be able to bring back a piece of the Law School history — to the Law School — so far after the fact,” Shucha says.

This editorial cartoon opposing the Espionage Act was published before Congress passed the law in June 1917. Federal prosecutors used the act to charge Becker less than a year later. Winsor McCay, Library of Congress; Green County Clerk of Courts

It was 17 degrees below zero outside when the shouting started inside the courthouse. Becker, a local judge, was among 50 or so residents who trudged through two feet of snow in the howling wind to attend a regularly scheduled meeting of the Green County Board. Not enough board members made the journey, so without a quorum, the group left county business aside. An informal and increasingly agitated conversation about the war erupted. Becker did not back down.

“There is no shortage of food. The idea of a shortage of food is being preached by agents employed by corporations for their own gains and going about the country on high-paid salaries,” said Becker, an ardent pacifist and Progressive Republican gubernatorial candidate. “This is a rich man’s war. There is no labor shortage. There is no seed shortage. Farmers, beware of taxes, war taxes, which must be paid in July.”

“I have listened to a speech which is seditious,” responded Monroe school superintendent Paul Neverman with indignation. “If the boys over in France could have heard his speech, they would make short work of him.”

“I doubt you can define the word seditious,” Becker replied.

“You’re a traitor,” the superintendent sneered.

Roughly three and a half months later, Albert Wolfe LLB1900, the U.S. Attorney for Western Wisconsin, made the accusation official.

In a 12-page indictment, he accused Becker of violating the Espionage Act of 1917. He charged him with seven counts of making false statements “willfully and feloniously … with the intent to interfere with the operation and success of the military and naval forces of the United States.”

  Becker was no stranger to challenging the government: he believed it was the definition of what citizens should do. He was the chair of Wisconsin’s Commission on Peace and lobbied for a citywide referendum in Monroe on whether the United States should get involved in World War I. In April 1917, three days before the U.S. entered the war, Becker and his fellow Monroe neighbors voted 954 to 50 against American intervention in the conflict.

The Milwaukee Journal called the referendum, “The Monroe Folly,” and wrote that the “stupidity and disloyalty” of the city injured the whole state. And the Los Angeles Times editorialized that there was “more disloyalty per square foot in Wisconsin than anywhere else in the country.”

But once U.S. soldiers headed to Europe, Becker encouraged his son to sign up for the military and stated publicly it was the responsibility of all citizens to support the war effort. At the same time, he poked and prodded at elected officials, as did his political mentor, Wisconsin Senator Robert La Follette 1879, to ensure a more representative policy.

“Judge Becker practiced a complex patriotism, not unlike that of Senator La Follette,” says Richard Pifer MA’76, PhD’83, who recently authored The Great War Comes to Wisconsin: Sacrifice, Patriotism, and Free Speech in a Time of Crisis. “He approached the war effort with similar integrity and nuance, advocating policies he thought best for the nation during the war, even when his position flew in the face of government policy, and even though the result would lead to hostile attacks by super-patriots with little understanding of the war or Judge Becker.”

Those “super-patriots” took Judge Becker to trial in August 1918. A jury took less than six hours to convict him and he was sentenced to three years at the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. Wolfe, the U.S. attorney, told reporters afterward that he hoped Becker’s situation would “deter” lesser citizens who might be disloyal. Becker was forced to resign the seat on the bench he’d been elected to five times and held for 21 years in his community.

“It seemed to me, the response to what he said was over the top,” says Leslie Bellais MA’09, curator of social history at the Wisconsin Historical Museum. “It was an ongoing struggle in America, balancing civil liberties with national security. We saw it all over the United States and especially in Wisconsin — this overwhelming desire to shut down civil rights — a reaction, as we would see it today, that seemed un-American.”

The museum displays a sign donated by Becker’s family members that someone affixed to their home during his 1918 trial. Below his name is a crudely drawn figure in yellow with a speech balloon that says, “Berlin for Me.”

“It’s a powerful statement that during World War I, people would attack others this way,” Bellais said. “It’s not an abstract concept. This impacted real people.”

Becker never served a day in jail, and the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned his conviction two years later, but the court of public opinion had rendered its verdict. He was defeated in his subsequent attempts to run for district attorney and for his former county judge seat.

When he died in 1926 at age 57, the local newspaper in Monroe described him as “a fighter, but fair. If he felt he was right, he battled to the end, staunchly supporting his friend, client, or cause upon which he was engaged and if defeated … winning admiration even of those opposed to him at the time.”